By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
In June 2005, the Paris Club of creditors announced a deal granting Nigeria “60% cancellation of its Paris Club total debt stock based on December 2004 figures.” It was a culmination of a campaign personally led by President Olusegun Obasanjo. For Nigerians, this was supposed to signal real savings that could be ploughed back into delivering public goods or what many around the country call “dividends of democracy.”
Instead, the Paris Club debt cancellation became a license for network criminality involving politicians, senior lawyers, and – it appears – some judges. The extent of the criminality is laid bare in court filings, records, rulings, judgments, and orders from across the country. The experience of Abia State dramatizes the extent of this criminality and why it is necessary for citizens to take an active role in visiting accountability upon those who perpetrated it.
The debt stock at issue in the Paris Club obligations included liabilities accrued by both the Federal Government and by states. To service the debt, the Federal Government originally debited periodic deductions as appropriate to each state. It turned out that over a seven year period from 1995 to 2002 the obligations of the states were mis-computed and they were debited with sums in excess of what they were supposed to pay.
It would take another decade before the sums were fully reconciled. In the end, the refunds due to the States from the excess deductions turned out to have been a lot of money. In June 2017, the Federal Government announced the payouts due to each state.
Under a deal approved by President Muhammadu Buhari in November 2016, the states were to share in a pot of N516.38 billion approximating to about $13 billion at the rate of exchange then. Specifically, the federating units agreed that these refunds were “part of the wider efforts to stimulate the economy and were specifically designed to support states in meeting salary and other obligations, thereby alleviating the challenges faced by workers.”
Abia State was to receive an initial sum of N11.43 billion as its share of the refund. Ultimately, it appears, the state got N16.347 billion. But long before this was announced, the machinery was already in motion by the manager of the state government to ensure it got nothing.
Shortly after President Buhari’s approval of the refunds, in early 2017, three different sets of vultures swooped to gobble up the funds due to Abia State. A fourth had been on the prowl since 2011. In different proceedings before the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, they claimed that they had been designated consultants to the Abia State government for the purpose of recovering the funds and were entitled each to between 24% or 30% of the refund.
- Suit No. FCT/HC/CV/0175/2017, Ziplon Concept Ltd Vs Government of Abia State, was before Sunday Aladetoyinbo;
- Suit No. FCT/HC/2470/2017, Mauritz Walton Nigeria Ltd Vs Government of Abia State, was before Keziah Ogbonnaya;
- Suit No. FCT/HC/CV/1044/2017, Techno Consult (Nig) Ltd Vs Government of Abia Statewas before Charles Agbaza;
- Suit No. FCT/HC/3877/11, Ned Munir Nwoko Vs Abia State Government was before Jude Okeke.
In October 2018, Mauritz Walton Nigeria Ltd, who were already claiming 24% of the recovery in a separate suit before Keziah Ogbonnaya, a judge of the FCT High Court, applied to be joined in the case by Ziplon Concept Ltd before another judge, Sunday Aladetoyinbo.
In its case, Ziplon Concept Ltd had claimed that they had a memorandum of understanding (MoU) since May 2012 with Abia State to receive 24% of the payout. In reality, the MoU relied on by Ziplon Concept was an undated document.
Mauritz Walton Ltd equally claimed to be the sole holders of such an agreement with Abia State as had Techno Consult (Nigeria) Ltd.
Ned Nwoko, a lawyer who would later be elected Senator in Delta State, claimed an appointment in similar terms with even greater antiquity.
When he ruled in December 2018, Justice Aladetoyinbo was withering: “where four parties are claiming to have executed same consultancy services…. and each of them claiming 24% and 30% of the Paris Club respectively, there is element of fraud and a court of law should not be a party to fraud.” According to the judge, “the people that perpetrated this fraud are officials of the [Government of Abia State] in collusion with some of the claimants. The Court remained shocked that the Attorney-General of Abia State refused to report this matter to the security agencies.”
The court explicitly found that some of the claims against the state were illegal and an attempt to “defraud the people of Abia State.” It, therefore, declined the application for joinder and instead requested the Attorney-General of Abia State to consolidate all four cases in order to facilitate a credible resolution and also to report the matter to law enforcement.
The Attorney-General of Abia State did nothing of the sort. Instead, he took steps to ensure the requests of the judge would be frustrated. The following year, after Sunday Aladetoyinbo retired as a judge of the FCT High Court, the same case, with the same case number, migrated to the court of Charles Agbaza, himself also a judge of the FCT High Court.
Four months before the 2023 general election, on 12 October 2022, then Attorney-General of Abia State, Uche Ihediwa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, (SAN), purported to reach a settlement with Ziplon Concepts Limited in which he claimed to yield up to the company N3.923 billion, supposedly 24% of the Paris Club refunds received by Abia State. The agreement also obliged the state government to set aside an additional N830 million into an escrow account as well as another $11.325 million to meet contingent liabilities which could arise if any of the other claims for 24% commission succeeded.
Not done, the settlement so-called obliged the Abia State Government to “deduct at source” and pay to one Chibuzo Aguocha, a known friend and front of the Attorney-General, a sum equivalent to five per-cent of the commission or just under N200 million, “as a professional fees (sic) for mediating the resolution of this suit.”
Charles Agbaza surely knew better because he was at the time presiding over a different case in which Techno Consult (Nigeria) Limited made exactly the same claim against the same defendant(s). Yet, on 7 November 2022, he quickly signed off on this as consent judgment with no questions asked.
It should be no surprise that Ziplon Concepts Ltd appeared to have had Mr. Ihediwa in its pockets. In a petition to the Abia State Government in 2023, Mauritz Walton (Nigeria) Ltd provided evidence to back up its claim that Ziplon Concept was a front for the family of a former Governor of Abia State.
To profit from this fraudulent transaction fronted by a former Attorney-General of the State, Ziplon Concept Ltd subsequently sought to seize funds due to Abia State from the Federation Account. In February 2025, Chinedu Oriji, a judge of the FCT High Court, discharged an order previously procured by the company against funds held for the benefit of Abia State by the Accountant-General of the Federation. The Court of Appeal has subsequently ordered them to go back to the High Court and prove their case.
The reason this story is important is how much it reveals of the complicity of legal institutions in laundering money, robbing the people, and making it all look kosher under ruse of law.
It seems quite clear on the evidence from the records that the former Attorney-General of Abia State could have a serious case of professional misconduct to answer before the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee.
The consent judgment of Charles Agbaza from November 2022 is also suspect. One can only hope that the present government of Abia State will show zero-tolerance for this network criminality and make public all the records in this piece of squalid spoliation so that all involved can be brought to account and the people of Abia can get the respite they deserve from two generations of fraudsters-in-law.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
